Scanning IRs and other trivia

[Andy Finney <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Q: why did you choose the coolscan--and are the IR negs looking better now?

   lydia

Wow ... that was a while ago Lydia.  How was Ireland by the way ... did you
shoot any Guiness-soaked IR?

I chose the Nikon Coolscan-II partly because the London Camera Exchange
shop in Guildford, Surrey, is a stockist ... and as I spend quite a lot of
money with them , they are quite friendly too ... and their price is very
good.  I had seen good reviews ... I can't afford a 32 or 36 bit scanner
.. and after trying it out I found it did produce good results with IR
negs and with the Ektachrome.

I haven't put anything on the web site yet because I've been busy with a
CD-ROM project for the EC ... I needed the scanner to deal with photos I
was taking for that ... and I also needed to supply some new images to a
web gallery in the US who (smiles) are featuring my work in October.

Practicalities?  Well, basically I have been learning how to use the
scanner since my last posting and I have discovered two crucial things
about it.  Firstly, I can re-allocate the 256 levels of the scan to
whatever portion of the negative grey tones I want.  So I can now cope with
wierdly exposed negs.  I can also do two scans (or more) from a single neg
and, in Photoshop, bolt them together to produce excellent results from a
wierdly exposed neg (Ektar, not IR).  This has helped me show details
outside a window from inside a relatively dimly lit room ... which was
surprisingly easy to do ... using the burned out window to make a mask with
which to insert the outside scene from the same neg but with a different
gamma on the scan.  (Ain't Photoshop wonderful!)

Also, by dodging and burning the scanned image I have been able to bring
back some of the magic that Trevor White (who prints my HIE) was able to do
in the darkroom.  So, in answer to your Q Lydia, the negs are looking
better now.  I still have a way to go to get them to look as good as Trevor
.. but then he's a professional ... and a good one at that.  (I can say
that as I know he doesn't look at this group).  I'll let you all know when
new images go up on the Invisible Light Site.

I have scanned some of my colour IRs.  I was not very excited with them,
but scanning and a bit of cropping and bending in Photoshop have changed
that a lot.  One great thing about electronically manipulating colour IR is
that there is no 'right' way, just as their is no 'real' color for the
scene.  That's why Wrigley's colour photos look so great to me.  I like to
think of the electronic manipulation I am now doing to the images as just
another phase of the process that goes from the original scene to our eyes.
I have no shame ;-)  The only bit of bad news is that the red channel is
sometimes very low in skies (they go deep blue) and this leads to
quantisation effects (blockiness usually) in that channel.  I had to put
some gaussian blur into the sky to couteract it.

Meanwhile I've been reading rather than posting ... enjoying all this talk
of poisonous chemicals, hating grain (I rarely drink anything else myself),
filters, Ilford's is it/isn't it extendared film (I have a roll but I
haven't shot any yet), astrophotography (I'd love to see a comparison of
the Orion neblua in 'real' and 'infra-red' colours) and so on and so forth.
So, not dead merely lurking.  And I've just come back from Majorca
(Spanish Mediterranean island for you yankees out there) and I shot a dozen
or so HIE images.  As I said, I'll let you know when I update the site.

Andy

http://www.demon.co.uk/atsf/ilight




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Topic No. 5